The hospitality was as relentless and indiscriminate as ever. More trays of lager and new bowls of chips were being brought in, even as people were starting to leave. But James had no intention of going just yet. They each reached for a glass and held it upwards, clashed them together like Viking warriors and took long, deep gulps
‘Well done, everyone,’ said Robert. ‘It was close, but a mightily deserved victory.’
‘Yes, thanks Robert, that was immensely enjoyable,’ said Felix. ‘And all the more so for conforming so beautifully to Aristotle’s first principle of drama.’
‘Too fucking right,’ said Angus.
‘Fucking cheers,’ said Adam. ‘We’ve fucking done it.’
They brought their glasses together again, and drank some more. Adam did some more swearing, he was getting better and better at it, while Angus made some homophobic remarks, which Felix in particular seemed to enjoy. Out of the corner of his eye, James could see the Korean girl, who was looking prettier than ever, arriving with a tray of brandies.
‘James, I’m going to leave you to your festivities,’ said Simon, handing him a business card. ‘But you’re very welcome here anytime. Just give me a call. And do fix something up with Robert – there’s plenty for us to talk about.’
James took the card. It hadn’t just been a good evening, it had been a highly successful one, and in this world the two were indistinguishable. Felix was right: he wasn’t a town planner, he was a planning professional – it was a crucial distinction. He might not be leaving the public sector just yet, but it looked like his years of public service were coming to an end.
11
12 March
London is an increasingly polarised city.
– The London Plan, Section 1.27
It was just as James had suspected. Alice had a boyfriend. Not just a lover, but a partner. He dreaded to think what he did for a living or how she’d met him, but the substantive fact was that she was in a structured sexual relationship – probably highly sexual, given it was Alice. He’d emailed her suggesting they go for a drink and, two days later, she’d replied in a hastily written email full of heartless typing errors, saying that she was going to be away with Sam for a week, as if he ought by now to be well aware who Sam was, and that she’d be sure to get in touch soon.
Well, that was fine. He was really fucked off about it, but it was fine. After all, it had never been his intention to go back out with Alice. Not now, not after all these years. It wasn’t part of the plan: it wasn’t what he wanted and it clearly wasn’t what she wanted. So what did he want? It was one of the first things Felix had asked him and he still wasn’t sure. On balance, what he would probably settle for was for her to be impressed with him. If it was his name she could be mentioning in dinner-party conversation, instead of all the writers and broadcasters she’d slept with. If she could be irritating and undermining her current boyfriend by continually banging on about James and all the astounding things he was up to – well, that would probably do.
All of this was unlikely to happen because, and there was no getting away from this, he was a town planner. Who on earth was going to talk about him at a dinner party? In all of history, how many famous town planners had there been? There was Baron Haussmann in Paris but he was controversial at best, there was Robert Moses in New York, who turned out to be wrong about everything, Albert Speer, who was only famous because he worked for Hitler, and then there was Abercrombie, who was indisputably great and good, but whom no one apart from other planners had ever heard of. And if there were any monuments to planners, then it came only after forty years of public service followed by a short fatal illness, and never amounted to anything more than a plaque on a park bench or, maybe, just maybe, having a Town Hall committee room named after you.
‘James, are you confident the average housing densities are compliant with the LDF?’
James looked around, and wondered for a moment where he was. In a meeting, obviously, but it was difficult to be certain which one. Lionel was speaking, Rachel wasn’t there, Kemal from Finance was – although that meant nothing and there was every chance that he wasn’t actually supposed to be. But the silly cow Jane who looked after the website was there, and so was that cocksure bastard Alex Coleman and Henry, a research officer who nobody knew much about and looked too old for his job title. So there was a good chance it was one of those entirely useless monthly planning-communications matrix meetings that Andrew Metcalfe had initiated six months ago, shortly before losing his job, but which no one had ever got round to cancelling. The truth was, James didn’t know. He had got into the office with an incredible hangover, turned on his computer, read his emails, noticed that a meeting had just started, and hurried to the room. All he had done since then was eat biscuits and drink tea and think about Alice.